How Undergraduates Get Shafted

Harvard students present and future should not expect many significant improvements in the quality of undergraduate education here. The oft-trumpeted curricular review, which releases its report today, essentially shelved many undergraduate concerns such as the presently abysmal quality of advising and teaching.

This is according to a source that saw the review’s major recommendations at a Committee on Undergraduate Education (CUE) meeting last week and spoke with The Crimson. “It is unacceptable that a review of this size failed to make improved advising and teaching a primary focus,” the source said.

While indeed unacceptable, it is par for the Harvard course. The College confers upon an inferior educational program the prestige of its name and, with the messy details of advising and teaching students, leaves the Harvard mystique to speak for reality.

The reality merits a closer look. “Upon arrival at one of the world’s most famous institutions of higher learning,” the Boston Globe reported in January, a first-year student will “most likely...be advised by a graduate student—who may or may not understand the ins and outs of Harvard’s undergraduate system.” Substituting for faculty advisers less-experienced graduate students, “who may or may not” know what they’re doing, seriously calls into question the College’s claim that it gives students an opportunity to interact regularly with some of the nation’s greatest professors.

Advising within the departments, especially in the social sciences, is also a display of incompetence. In a 1999 survey given to graduating seniors, 34 percent of government concentrators said “yes” to the question of whether they were advised which courses to take. Only 31 percent of economics concentrators said “yes” to the question of whether their academic interests were discussed. Thus the great talent and promise students bring to the College is squandered. The formal advising system is an evident failure. Isolated geographically and socially from upperclass students, first-years do not have frequent access to informal advising.

This is a shame, because case-hardened upperclass students know well the nature of the College’s introductory courses and Core courses. Such classes are often very large, and in several egregious cases like the survey course “Principles of Economics,” professors do not have office hours. The Core Curriculum itself, by herding together non-concentrators, creates a culture with the worst possible incentives: Students are by definition not excited about the subject, and professors suspect it.

But the point here is not so much that the Core Curriculum fails to excite. The curricular review proposes substantial changes to the structure of the Core. Rather, complaints about the Core are nothing new and indeed surfaced almost as soon as the Core’s deficiencies were apparent, while College administrators did nothing. Their inattention to problems with the College’s general education program over the years is not an encouraging sign that future shortcomings will be addressed.

Also slipping under administrative radar and passing for education here are left-wing catechisms on such topics as social activism and multiculturalism. In his book Illiberal Education, Hoover Institution research fellow Dinesh D’Souza described a Nov. 1989 French class at Harvard, which “resembled a political rally” and consisted of feminist jokes about severed penises. The College’s great strides in 15 years have produced this semester a course on “Personal Choice and Global Transformation,” which weighs important commentary from “a socially engaged actress from ‘Buffy the Vampire-Slayer.’” The 2003-2004 CUE Guide took time out from describing students blowing a Foreign Cultures class, in order to get in on the act itself—taking care to emphasize “the professor’s sensitive and pluralistic treatment of the material, giving the students a diverse perspective.”

Indeed, the curricular review’s theme of “internationalization” is in part a call for more of this kind of fluffy treatment of foreign cultures, sanitized through a Western “pluralistic” lens so that nobody’s feelings get hurt. Meanwhile, students who do not hew a narrow ideological line will suffer in the classroom. Kenan Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield ’53 described Harvard professors to the Boston Globe: “Everybody is a liberal and shows it. They conduct classes in such a way as to make conservatives feel excluded. The atmosphere is very politicized.” No one should delight in this. A “politicized atmosphere” that dogmatically excludes one side offers few opportunities for learning through honest discussion and peer interaction.

It’s best, however, not to dwell on one’s personal expectations but instead to hold Harvard to the standards it sets for itself. The College strives, according to its mission statement, “to open the minds of students to...knowledge” and “to enable students to take best advantage of their educational opportunities.” Shoddy advising, an uninspiring and neglected Core Curriculum culture and closed-minded Liberalism in the classroom demonstrate that the College fails on those fronts it has identified as important. For not adequately addressing these failures, the curricular review disappoints.

Luke Smith ’04, a Crimson editorial editor, is an economics concentrator in Quincy House.